Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird, a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to ensure that it is high quality. To do this, the branching of 1.7 from the trunk has been delayed by a week to Friday 9th April and the final release of Mozilla 1.7 has been moved out a month to mid-May. Between the branching and the final version, three release candidates of Mozilla 1.7 will be made available, much like there were for Mozilla 1.0 and Mozilla 1.4. These release candidates will ensure that the 1.7 branch gets more testing and QA work.

While most welcome the fact that the aging 1.4 branch is to be replaced by something more modern, some developers have expressed concern that the decision to use 1.7 has been made so late in the release cycle.